Scottish Book of the Month

 

Along with being longlisted for the Saltire Awards Scottish Book of the Year, I'm delighted that The Unrecovered has been chosen by Waterstones as the Scottish Book of the Month for October!

I spent a busy morning going round bookshops in Edinburgh, including the Princes Street branch of Waterstones, the Gyle Centre branch, Toppings, and Golden Hare Books.

A paperback has always felt like a book's natural state to me, so it's been really exciting seeing it piled high in such a generous offer (and sharing space with Andrew Miller's Booker-shortlisted The Land in Winter). I'm going to be in St Andrews and Dundee on Friday (3rd Oct) signing copies, at 12pm and 2.30pm respectively, and I'll try to get through to Glasgow this weekend as well to sign at Sauchiehall Street, Argyle Street (where I used to work), and Byres Road.

Back from Bloody Scotland, and another award listing

 Bloody Scotland, the festival of crime writing, is over for another year. I wrote elsewhere how pleased I was to be shortlisted for the Debut Prize despite not having writing a traditional crime novel, and although in the end I didn't win (that deserved honour went to David Goodman for his novel 'A Reluctant Spy') I had a great time all the same. The Debut Authors panel in Stirling Central Library was really well-attended, and I enjoyed talking through our different journeys to publication with my fellow shortlistees. I was also on a panel on Sunday, with David Reynolds and EC Nevin, entitled 'Poachers Turned Gamekeepers', about our experiences as booksellers and publishers, and how this might have informed our approach to writing. Given that I'm published by a Bloomsbury imprint, I enjoyed having the opportunity to thank David Reynolds, as one of the founders of Bloomsbury, for me indirectly sitting there.

Last week brought other good news, when I found out that The Unrecovered is on the Fiction prize longlist for the Saltires, Scotland's National Book Awards. I'm really delighted with this, and hopefully I can get through to the shortlist next month. My main ambition for The Unrecovered was to have the book long- or shortlisted for at least two awards (if not all the awards...), and so far it's done its job. This isn't hubris on my part, it's just a way of signalling to my publishers that I was worth the bet, and that hopefully I'm worth the bet going forward with a third book. Being a published author is basically a temporary experience that could stop at any moment. The more outward success this book has, and the second novel in April '26, the more likely I am to publish another, and another after that.

Beyond that, the Bloody Scotland experience really underlined how terrible I am at keeping social media up to date. In retrospect I had any number of opportunties to post 'content', which I singularly failed to do, but given that I think social media is poisonous and contemptible, and is clearly tearing society apart, this maybe isn't something to worry about. I'll do my best in the future, but I have no idea how much of an effect any of it has on the critical or commercial viability of my books, which, let's be honest, is the whole point. At the moment I seem to have gravitated more to Instagram as a tolerable medium; it's not as much of a cess pit as Twitter, or a censorious echo chamber like BlueSky, and fewer people feel the need to post nebulous and rebarbative 'political' statements on it. The little corner of it that I've seen makes it feel more like what the internet was always supposed to be; an irrelevant space for trivial cat videos, and easy to ignore. But given that I'm posting this on Blogger, the original form of social media, perhaps hypocrisy is fundamentally unavoidable. I'll continue leaning into Instagram for the time being.

Next up will be some signings for the paperback of The Unrecovered in October. I'll formally be at the Waterstones in St Andrews and Dundee, and I'll unofficially get myself around as many bookshops as I can around that date. More to follow.

Fantasy and genre

I'm currently finishing off China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station, which I first tried to read two or three years ago. I remember bouncing off the first five pages, confused and unable to find my bearings, and feeling generally repelled by the whole thing, but this time I've devoured it in less than a week. It was far less forbidding than I thought it was going to be, more generous and fast-paced, and wearing its pulp heritage proudly. My experience of it perfectly illustrates the old truism that what you bring to a novel is as important in its reception as what the writer brings to the page. Something that can seem annoying or rebarbative one moment can, with a little internal adjustment, seem thrilling and transgressive the next. I think I'll write something at length about Mieville in the future, [I can't find any way on Blogger to add the acute over the first 'e' in his name, sorry], once I've had a chance to read a few more of novels. I've got Kraken up next. I can't think of a writer who's made me look askance at the page more often since I read William Burroughs as a teenager.

Perdido Street Station comes during a summer of reading fantasy for me, in part because I've finished the draft of a novel and wanted something more escapist to read (and I don't mean that pejoratively), and partly because I'm gearing up to have another crack at writing a fantasy novel of my own. When I signed with my agent, about three years ago, this was always part of our plan; that I would write 'proper' books as my main focus, and draw on my Black Library/Warhammer experience to write fantasy novels as a sideline. It's a genre I broadly enjoy, although I'm quite picky about what I read in it. I have an essay in Dan Coxon's upcoming anthology Writing the Magic exploring my experience writing for Black Library, and my sometimes conflicted thoughts about fantasy more generally. Last year I finished the first part in a putative trilogy, a more traditional low-fantasy affair, but so far it hasn't picked up any interest from publishers. Assuming the book isn't incredibly boring or just total garbage, I suspect this is in part because of the market, which at the moment seems more focused on chasing formerly self-published Romantasy from American writers, in search of the next Sarah J. Maas or Rebecca Yarros (which is fair enough; they've sold millions). Publishing more widely is a deeply conservative business, and trends will be flogged to death before the next one emerges for a similar course of greedy flagellation. But then, every book a publisher pays to have published is a gamble, and might make nothing at all.

Quite apart from this, a lot of the discourse surrounding fantasy, and genre more broadly, can be depressing. I'm occasional lurker on the Fantasy sub-Reddit, and I've found it surprising how much of the conversation turns around the concept of 'tropes'. People will ask for recommendations based on a  set of their favourite tropes, like they're choosing a sandwich filling. 'Enemies to friends', 'enemies to lovers', 'found family', 'cosy', 'chosen one', 'magic school'. The idea not just that genre fiction can be broken down to these tropes, but that it should be, is deeply strange to me. It's an approach to fiction that feels one step removed from what our AI overlords are going to foist on us before too long; that you can dial up any type of novel you want to read and have it delivered within seconds by ChatGPT, or the soulless entity of your choice. In a genre that already suffers  disproportionately under Sturgeon's Law (that 90% of anything is crap), I don't think this attitude is doing much to improve it.

But then that's only Reddit, and shouldn't really be taken as a representative sample of anything other than people who spend far too much of their time online. It does look like there's plenty of good stuff out there; I want to read Simon Jimenez's The Spear Cuts Through Water, a load of Jeff Vandermeer and M. John Harrison, Sofia Samatar, Pierce Brown. There's more than enough to keep me occupied as I plan my next assault on the bastion of fantasy.

Event

 

I've got an event coming up next week, as part of the Book Fringe in Edinburgh! It'll be at Argonaut Books in Leith, on the 14th August at 7pm, alongside Lucy Ribchester. We'll be discussing our novels The Unrecovered and Murder Ballad.

Various interviews

 A few things to catch up on, after the Bloody Scotland shortlisting: 

Here's an interview with me, Natalie Jayne Clark and Claire Wilson on the UK Crime Bookclub channel:

Here's an interview with all of the shortlisted writers on the Scots Whay Hae podcast. (I think there might be a video of this on YouTube as well)

Finally, I had a short interview with the Scottish Field magazine here.

(I managed to watch about ten seconds of the video: hearing your own stupid voice is one thing, but hearing it as it comes out of your own stupid face is another thing entirely...)

Shortlisted

 It just goes to show how terrible I am at social media and self-promotion more generally that I haven't got round to updating this blog with my latest piece of news. Anyway, The Unrecovered has been shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize, which will be judged on 12th September in Stirling.

Bloody Scotland is a literary festival specifically for crime fiction. I was interviewed on their podcast when the novel first came out (I wrote about it here), and although I wasn't sure if my book strictly counted as crime, it certainly counts as a literary mystery. I'll be on a panel with the other shortlisted authors (David Goodman, Natalie Jayne Clark, Foday Mannah and Claire Wilson) on the 12th, just before the prize announcement.

I'll also be appearing on a panel on the 14th September, with Sarah Hornsley and David Reynolds, entitled 'Gamekeepers Turned Poachers', looking at the experience of writers who have worked in other parts of the publishing industry:

I was in Stirling last Thursday for the launch of the programme, and was interviewed alongside the other shortlistees in the Courier:

There should be another couple of podcast interviews lined up with me and the other shortlisted authors over the next few weeks. I'll add the details here when I can.

I have an odd relationship with Stirling, on the whole. I was born there, but only lived there for my first 20 months or so, before my family moved to Trinidad for the next four years. For a couple of years, roughly 2000 - 2002, I lived down the road in Larbert and would head into the town regularly (because there was absolutely nothing to do in Larbert). Then, in the sceond half of 2004, I lived on my own in a poky flat on Cowane Street while working at the Waterstones in the Thistle Centre, before moving to Dumfries for a while. And now its the scene of The Unrecovered's first shortlisting for anything, so hopefully all these earlier attachments and associations bring me luck on the night.

Summer plans, proofs, genre

 The copy edits on the second novel* are done and have been sent back to Bloomsbury, and the next stage is to await the proofs for a last check-through before the book goes into production. Did I say a last check-through? Of course not; there will inevitably be half a dozen other chances to drag my resisting eyes through the text, cringing at every single word, until the book is actually published. I found with The Unrecovered that there was a strange cooling-off period lasting two months or so after the novel came out. During that time I absolutely hated the thing, and it was only after I had some distance from it that I could look on it with even the vaguest equanimity. I'm hoping that period is a bit more condensed this time round. This second novel was much harder to write and involved a lot more research, but going through the copy edits made me feel that I might actually have got close to what I was trying to achieve. It'll be interesting to see if that holds up when I look through the proofs.

I've also finished the very rough first draft of a third novel, the last part of my tentatively connected, thematically linked trilogy (which isn't a trilogy) about war, history and trauma, filtered through the lens of the supernatural. If The Unrecovered hints towards the gothic mystery, the second novel is going to be a sort-of ghost story, while this third novel hints towards cosmic horror. All three of these books are attempting to make their metaphors concrete; to use what the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called 'the mask of genre'**, employing the fantastical to decipher and renew a shop-worn reality. As is my usual practice, I've printed out the typescript of this third book and will spend the summer carving it down and refining it as much as possible before sending it on to my agent in the autumn.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the rest of the year, unless it's tinker away at this third book until it's ready to submit. I've got plenty of ideas for a possible next novel, but it might be wiser to step away from the notebook for the time being. If you have a general facility for writing, there is such a thing as writing too much after all...

* Such is the opacity of publishing, I've no idea whether the title and plot of this second novel is a closely-guarded industry secret, but I'll keep everything unnamed for the moment.

** I cannot find the reference for this quote anywhere, but I'm sure del Toro said it. It probably comes from his superb book Cabinet of Curiosities.